* * *
BUT NO FURTHER attack came. When half an hour had gone by according to J.B.’s wrist chron, Ryan cautiously called for everyone to stand down. Leaving the rest to keep watch, he went out with Jak to look for signs of the flitting ghosts.
They found some broken branches, and blood spattered on leaves and the grass where the scream had come from. Reassuringly, it was red. What was less reassuring was the fact that not even Jak’s keen eyes and tracking skills were able to find any usable trails away from the sinkhole. “Right,” Ryan said, coming back to the lip of the sinkhole. The sun started to sink behind the western trees. “We still don’t know who they were, what they were, or where they went. But they seem to be gone now. So let’s pack up some medium-value scavvy and hump it into Sinkhole.”
“How do we know the creatures won’t spy on us as we do?” Doc asked.
“We don’t, Doc,” Ryan replied. “But I don’t propose to live out the rest of my days according to what I’m afraid these things we couldn’t even get a clear look at might do.”
* * *
LIGHT LIKE THE dancing orange flames of hell threw the shadow of Wymea Berdone, and the limp and lifeless figure she carried in her arms, all distorted onto the bare and beaten ground before her.
Behind her, the only home she knew burned with a bellow like a gigantic, raving beast.
Aside from a butcher knife from the kitchen, its blade reduced to little more than a finger-width by repeated honings, she was unarmed. She had been forced to leave even her father’s treasured ax behind in the blazing house, with the chills of her mother and stepfather.
If the bastard cowards who murdered my baby sister come for me, she thought, so much the worse for them!
The rickety roar gave way with a great rumbling and cracking and a redoubling of the intensity of the glare. Without a backward glance, Wymie turned onto a path scarcely wider than a deer track, and, barefoot and grieving, began the two-mile walk to Sinkhole, the nearest ville.
Where she meant to find justice. Even if it killed her.
“Potar Baggart, back off this instant!”
Ryan lifted the beer mug to his lips.
It was the bartender who spoke, sharply yet without obviously raising his voice. The other hubbub in the Stenson’s Creek gaudy, which had risen to a crescendo of happy anticipation when Potar tried to pick a fight with the grubby group of outlanders, abruptly died.
Potar was a big man, with a clenched red fist of a face beneath blond hair that would have been described as “dirty blond” had it been clean, which it wasn’t. The general smell wafting from him suggested to Ryan that neither it nor the rest of him had been clean in a long time. Ryan sipped his beer. It was good; the landlord was proud of his skills as a brewmaster, and so far as the one-eyed man was concerned, he was entitled. Ryan hadn’t risen from the chair where he’d been sitting at a table in the gaudy’s darkest corner with his friends when the lummox Potar came over and started making suggestions of a distinctly unwelcome kind to Krysty. But though the big man didn’t back off at the whip-crack command, Ryan saw the tension go out of him like the hammer of a blaster being returned gently down with a thumb.
So he let his own hand slip from the hilt of the his panga, with which he’d been preparing to gut the huge man like a fish when he made the move he was so clearly working himself up for.
The bartender, a middle-sized, prematurely balding man whose name was Mathus Conn, and who also happened to own and run the gaudy, also seemed to notice the big man’s reaction.
“Now step right back from there, you hear?” he said, his tone softer, but barely. “Now. You don’t want me to reach under the counter.”
Though sitting in a half sprawl in the chair as if solidly at his ease, Ryan watched the man-mountain narrowly through his lone eye. He knew an aggressor usually had to get himself worked up to actually launch an attack. It was just human nature. But he also knew that in some men that could happen with frightening speed.
But apparently he didn’t want to see what the gaudy owner had under the counter. Instead his raised his ham-slab hands placatingly toward the bar as he shuffled away across the dried-grass-covered floor.
“I wonder what he does have under there,” Ricky said beneath his breath.
“Sawed-off double-barrel 10-gauge muzzle-loader,” J.B. said softly, “if I had to guess.”
“Sorry, Mathus,” Potar said. “Just funnin’ a little. You know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“I know no such thing,” Conn stated crisply. “But I do know you. And you know I don’t put up with trouble inside my place. So I reckon it’s time for you to leave.”
The huge man looked around. The gaudy was filled with faces lit yellow by smoky oil lamps. None of them looked sympathetic. Potar turned and strode out, head high, as if leaving was his idea.
“He’s the town bully over to Sinkhole,” Conn told the companions.
“We figured,” Mildred replied.
“I think he just wants acceptance.”
“The kind of big lunk who has no real harm in him, huh?” Mildred said acerbically.
Ryan cocked a disapproving brow at her. The gaudy owner was their main and best customer for their scavvy. He saw no point in letting Mildred sour a perfectly profitable business relationship.
Conn laughed without much real humor. “Oh, there’s plenty harm in him,” he said. “It just happens to stem from him not being able to find a place in the world, is all.”
Ryan looked around at his friends. With his head turned so no one else in the gaudy could see but them, he inflated his cheeks and blew out an exaggerated sigh between pursed lips.
Krysty winked at him.
Stenson’s Creek’s gaudy was much like any other, if cleaner than most. That made it different from the nearby ville of Sinkhole, which was something of a dump. It seemed to be run-down more from a sense of comfortable complacency than from the pervasive despair that defined much of the world outside the Pennyrile district. The gaudy was a sprawling roadhouse in the woods, east of Sinkhole along the creek that provided its name. It was mostly solid postnuke construction, fieldstone and timber. The bar was polished local hardwood. The tables and chairs had a crude look to them, as if they’d been made with little concern for appearance. But they were sturdy. The place didn’t offer much by way of decor, but that wasn’t what Conn was in the business of selling, and his customers didn’t seem to mind.
“Hey, big boy,” a dispirited-looking gaudy slut asked a man at the table nearest Ryan and company, “looking for a good time?”
She wore a ragged skirt, a blouse whose neckline hung almost as low as her breasts did and a sort of scarf around her neck made of interwoven rags. It was apparently meant to suggest a feather
